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IBM's Eck: "We are building a third-party system to increase the value of our platform"

Tom Eck, global chief technology officer of industry platform at IBM, shares how the company is taking an open application programming interface approach to spur innovation and make it easier for companies to do business with IBM.

The company caters to financial services developers and institutions of all sizes from big banks to financial technologies (fintechs)

IBM is building a third-party ecosystem of fintechs and other partners to bring their assets into its platform

Here is the transcript:

Tom Eck: Right, there’s a couple of things here. First of all, what we want to do is we want to start addressing clients in very specific industries. So, we have a lot of horizontal offerings that kind of cross many industries, which we continue to sell. But we are also augmenting them with capabilities that are very focused on different industries and then within those industries very specific use cases. So, the first industry that we are tackling is financial services. And we are catering two financial services developers and institutions of all sizes from big banks to fintechs. And the real important thing here is we’re also taking in an API-first approach, which makes it, first of all, a lot easier to do business with IBM and it spurs innovation through our Bluemix platform. So, very quickly a developer can look at API offering that we have, play around with it, at no cost. And determine if it’s something that they like to buy from us. And we’re also building a third-party ecosystem of fintechs and other partners so we could bring their assets unto our platform too, which increases the overall value the platform to our clients. And this is one of the new ways that we are doing business with our customers. Well, we’re helping our clients, it’s a really good question because the clients have to get kind of their technology base into, I quote like “digital agility mode” so that they can participate in the API economy. Many have never called an API, or written an API so we first have to help them to get to that position. And once we got them there, then it makes easy for them to consume and even offer their own APIs.